


Polytropos

by nerdyvixen



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/M, maybe I just like peppering in some astronomy puns because no one tells me how to live my life, maybe I'm just trash for extended classics metaphors, maybe this is hurt/comfort, this is all fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 10:33:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15928643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdyvixen/pseuds/nerdyvixen
Summary: Set during 2x12: "That night was long." Because you can't tell me they didn't have interactions beyond what we know.----Her silence is strange, he realizes. Even when she isn’t speaking, she’s always thinking, and she can think louder than even the ghosts in his head. But now the ghosts have fled to their graves, and the rain taps against the windows, and her hand is small in his, and her hand is warm in his, and her hand in his is warm enough that he thinks she might hold the spark of creation between their palms.Now that, he tells himself drily, is going too far.





	Polytropos

The night is charged with a gentle storm, and he closes his eyes before the thunder breaks.

They’ve spoken--how long, he couldn’t say. He told her about Coralee, and Alex pushed him, and she pressed him, as she always does, and now, after a tumble through their history, they’ve grown quiet. He has since filled up their glasses again--two fingers in each, neat--and taken up post on his side of the couch. Outside, rain sifts through the post-midnight darkness and draws its fingertips down the windows. Next to him, Alex sips her whiskey. He can hear the soft motion as she raises the glass, can hear the sharp intake of breath against the liquor’s burn.

He does not open his eyes.

They remain shut when she stills for a moment before carefully setting the glass down on the coffee table, before she rises and moves to stand in front of him, wedging herself between his knees. He obligingly parts them for her--how can he say no? How can he tell her no _now_ , with the fissures between them cracking and creaking and breaking?--but she doesn’t move any closer.

He knows what _should_ happen, because if he believes in anything anymore, it is the power of a story. In the story that people should tell of them, she should see how broken he is, murmur pithy words like she could piece together two decades of ruin into something resembling a man with her earnestness alone. She should bend to her knees in front of him, clasp his hands in her own small, warm ones, and press kisses to his fingertips until he opens his eyes and at last, at _last_ presses his mouth to hers. They should build a fire out of her want and his grief until both of them burn, until he finds solace and meaning in skin against skin.

This should happen, and so, because he is who he is, and she is who she is, and because the liquor burns in his throat but doesn’t burn out the ghost of a wife, it doesn’t.

They stay there for a long while until their slow breathing syncs. “Alex,” he says.

She shifts forward, almost imperceptibly. “Richard.”

He can’t open his eyes. He can’t look at her. Seeing is believing, and belief has so little to do with what he knows anymore, but he understands, he _believes_ one thing on the marrow-level: if he opens his eyes and sees pity beyond measure in hers, he will be destroyed more completely than Coralee could have ever managed.

He can feel her reach out. He can feel her hesitate. Is she going to pull him to her? Is she going to sink to his level, to her knees? _Sink,_ he begs her in his head, and even the thought has knife edges. _You drove me to this madness. Tear yourself apart for me, Alex Reagan. I’m not going to be the only one in pieces_.

Her hand comes to rest in his hair.

And suddenly, there is quiet. The point of contact is warmer than it should be, and he leans forward until the crown of his head meets the soft flesh of her middle. She doesn’t say anything more, but after a minute, her fingers begin to move through his hair. She hums a little. He can barely hear her over the rain. Everything around him is fluid.

“Come on, Richard,” she whispers. “You need some sleep.”

She steps away and interlaces his fingers with her own, tugging him to his feet. He towers over her. She still manages to smile up at him. It is a thin, watery sort of smile, but it clenches around his heart anyway. For all her spark and fire, tonight she is water enough to drown him, and for a moment, he understands how creation and destruction--even love--all come from the sea.

She doesn’t say anything else as she leads him up the stairs to the room he’d claimed. Her silence is strange, he realizes. Even when she isn’t speaking, she’s always _thinking_ , and she can think louder than even the ghosts in his head. But now the ghosts have fled to their graves, and the rain taps against the windows, and her hand is small in his, and her hand is warm in his, and her hand in his is warm enough that he thinks she might hold the spark of creation between their palms.

 _Now that_ , he tells himself drily, _is going too far._

“Are you all right?”

Alex’s voice is too loud, and it’s underscored by a low grumble of thunder. He does not startle at either--he _doesn’t_ , he insists to the voice in his head, which for now appears to be coming from the imaginary throat of a disapproving Nic Silver--and offers her a lopsided smile. “As well as can be expected,” he says.

She stares at him for a long moment, her mouth pressed into a thin worry of a line.

He grimaces and runs his free hand through his hair. “Alex,” he says, but he can’t find the rest of the words that should follow her name. She’s _looking_ at him again, and he has the distinct feeling of being naked. He could almost handle it if it were a literal fact, a statement of status--if it were both of them, warm and bare. He knows she’s lost weight. He knows she’s not sleeping well. He knows that if the situation were more intimate-- _differently_ intimate--he could count her ribs with his fingertips, brush each of them with a kiss until he climbed up to the column of her throat and the slide of her jaw. He knows that he could press himself into her until they both slept, satiated. He knows that she would let him.

He doesn’t know what else to say.

Alex frowns again, then, with visible effort, pulls her mouth into a soft smile. “That was a bad question,” she admits, squeezing his hand. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

She looks down at their hands, fingers still intertwined, and he can’t find it in himself to pull away. “You were honest with me,” she says finally. “I know this--it can’t have been easy, Richard.”

“It’s not been,” he says, his voice a ghost.

“And--I’ve pushed. A lot. Not always in the best way.” Her eyes are still focused on their fingers. His eyes are still focused on her, the way her breath stirs the lock of hair that falls in front of her face, the way she bites her lip in between thoughts. Easier, yes, he knows, to focus on the physicality of her, the way she settles into a space like a cat no matter where she goes.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “For...for pushing my way in. But thank you for letting me.”

Lightning illuminates her face, sliding her features into sharp contrast, before thunder provides a reassuring murmur. The storm is pulling away, though the rain stays. His arms are around her before he knows he’s done it, gathering her smaller frame against his own larger one. He feels her stiffen in surprise for a moment--they don’t touch, not like this, not in the way that says _you matter to me, you mean something to me, you are a lead weight on the sheet of my universe_ \--before she all but melts into him. It’s so easy to breathe in time with her. It’s so easy to close his eyes and bury his nose into her hair and breathe her in, soap and lightly floral shampoo and that faint acrid edge of alcohol. It’s so easy to have someone else be warm for him, for a moment, for this small slice of forever.

_Water takes the form of the vessel it’s in._

She is fluid, deep, drowning. For a long time, he’s seen her as a journalist, however loosely. As a thorn in his side. As a willing partner, perhaps, in this deadly game of catch-me-if-you-can with all the demons and poltergeists of his past. She’s been human for so long, achingly, failingly human, prone to making mistakes in her earnest chase of something askance of truth. Her words come back to him: _It’s easy to forget you’re a man sometimes._

With Alex warm against him, her face pressed into his sweater, her fingers locked around his waist, he suddenly realizes he’d forgotten that, too.

Coralee saw the man he was--saw his brilliance, saw his own fire stoked by the flint of his intellect and his impatience in equal parts--but she is the most concrete evidence of a ghost he’s ever seen, and she isn’t here. Not anymore. Alex _is_ here, present, hearth-warm and bold as sunlight. He squeezes his eyes tight. She is bright enough to burn. “I don’t deserve your kindness,” he says into her hair.

“I don’t deserve your forgiveness,” she says into his sweater.

“I don’t deserve your help. You shouldn’t have to walk with me through all of this.” So much easier to speak into the darkness behind his eyes than to look her in the face, to peel layers of himself away under her gaze until he is naked and at his core.

“You tried to tell me to stop. I didn’t. I kept pushing. I said it was for the story, but it--it’s for you. I know you said we’re in this together, and that I should trust you, but--”

His heart clenches. _Oh._ Two thoughts swirl together in his head, and he can’t separate them. One-- _it’s for you_. Of course Alex can’t be direct about this, even when she’s being direct. Of course she finds words that sound a lot like devotion but don’t have to mean anything more than a declaration of a gift. Of course. Of course. Two-- _I should trust you, but…_

_But you’re broken, Richard._

_But I don’t trust you. Not with everything else._

_But you don’t make it easy._

“It’s fine,” he interrupts. “You don’t have to--”

“That’s not what I meant,” she protests, mostly into his shirt. He should pull away, but his arms aren’t listening to his brain and stay wrapped around her.

 _To be fair,_ he points out to the disapproving-Nic voice in his head, _she hasn’t let go, either._

“Then what _did_ you mean, Alex?” he says.

He can feel her take a deep breath. “But I’m scared,” she admits finally. “I’m scared that I got you too far into this. I’m scared that we’ve done something irreversible. I’m scared of what I’m going to find when I look at another tape. I’m scared that Simon is going to send me some random message and turn everything upside down again.”

“Alex--”

“I’m scared that I’m not going to be able to sleep anymore.” She acts like she hasn’t heard him, but he feels her grip tighten, just for a moment. “I’m scared that I’ve lost track of what it means to be a journalist. I’m scared that I’ve compromised everything--everyone--that I care about--”

“Even me?”

Her head jerks back, and he glances down in time to see her eyes widen enough that he can almost see white all the way around. Her mouth is open for a moment before she snaps it shut and tilts her head to the side. “You think I don’t care about you?”

“I’m not an easy man to care about,” he says stiffly. In the darkness, he can pretend like this is a dream, like there won’t be consequences to a confession, just absolution. “As you’ve seen demonstrated by my spectacular ability to keep a wife.”

She frowns. “All of this...this _thing_ with Coralee doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be cared about.”

“No?” he questions bitterly.

“No, it doesn’t,” she says, and her voice is as soft as his hurt isn’t. “Coralee’s actions were her own, and they weren’t fair, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you don’t have answers, and I’m sorry that you’re...that you’re collateral in all this. It’s not fair, and I--I want you to know I’m going to do everything I can to tilt the odds in your favor.” She smiles resolutely. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Alex--”

She slips out of his arms then, and the atmosphere between them shifts into something else, something closer to professional than confessional. He swallows disappointment, and it goes down easy. “Go get ready for bed,” she commands with a little laugh he can’t quite parse. “I need to get something real quick, and I’ll be right back.”

She’s down the stairs back to the living room before his brain catches up. How casual she’d sounded, he realizes slowly--like it was habit for her to put him to bed, or rather, like it was habit for her to be a part of the ritual of sleep. He blinks owlishly at the dark before shaking his head to clear it and opening the door to the room. _Better to change clothes and brush my teeth,_ he thinks. _Easier. Yes._

He shucks himself of his clothes quickly, pulling on soft sweatpants and a thin white t-shirt, and then heads to the adjacent bathroom. The lights shudder to wakefulness when he flicks the switch, and he blinks again at the fluorescence. The white light is sharper than the lightning and twice as grounding.

Without thought, he bends over the sink and splashes cool water on his face, then brushes his teeth briskly. The habit offers no comfort. He grips the sides of the sink, cool porcelain pressing into too-warm skin. Everything is suddenly too sharp, so obviously real it seems fake. He’s a fool, she’s a danger, he’s broken, she’s just going to pulverize what’s left in pursuit of some greater idea of story--something archetypal and moving and bound to destroy everything he’s built up over the years. The coolness of the sink does nothing to erase the memory of the cosmogonic warmth of her hand in his, the way her lips turned up in that hesitant smile, the way she felt pressed against him with her arms about his waist, and he closes his eyes against the sudden surge of feeling in his ribs.

He can’t stay away from her. Her mouth is an event horizon, and he is a star collapsing in on himself, and the odds of this working out in a way that leaves both of them standing are, in fact, astronomical.

“Richard?”

“I’ll be out in a moment,” he replies automatically. _Liar_ , he tells himself, meeting his own eyes in the mirror. Bright blue meets bright blue, and he waits to see which will crack first. Stasis is safe. Stasis, this strangely liminal room with its sharp lighting and water, circles him until he is drifting in womb-like grief.

Alex knocks gently, and he startles. “Yes, sorry,” he says, drawing in a steadying breath before opening the bathroom door. “I--I got distracted.”

She blinks at him.

He blinks at her.

Slowly, a pale flush rises in her cheeks, and he sees one hand tighten around a book. “Sorry,” she echoes, though with round vowels. “I. Yes. Anyway.” She flaps her free hand in between them, the action graceless and strange, and he stares at her until she blinks again and moves a little to the side to let him pass.

The bed, he realizes in the next moment, presents a problem.

She seems to realize it in the same moment. Her cheeks go pinker, but she lifts her chin resolutely, and in the strangeness of the evening, the lightheaded awareness he has of her steeling herself is almost maddening. He wonders which intimacy embarrasses her more: the casual emotional intimacy of curling up in the this quiet and sense-driven space, or the physical intimacy of being close enough that they could trade breath and truth between their mouths and hands and the spaces between their ribs? The two intertwine, he thinks slowly, and that is the problem.

Alex cannot be separated.

He has tried--if he believed in a god, then that god would know he has tried--to keep her away from all of this, from his edges, from his shadows. He has let the acid anger and frustration spill from his mouth. He has used their closeness to hurt so that she wouldn’t push closer. But she’s here.

_You’re at the center of this with me._

He steadies his shoulders and crosses over to the bed, then perches on the edge, facing the window. A moment later, he hears her follow, and the mattress sinks a little beneath her. They sit there, not facing each other, for a long breath, before he hears her sigh and feels her shift to curl up against the pillows. He hears a thump--a book opening, he realizes--and hears her fumble with something he presumes to be a reading light, and then:

“Tell me about a complicated man.”

Her voice is cool as a stream. He stares at the sliver of rain-soaked glass visible through the curtains.

“Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home.”

He knows the story now--maybe not this translation, but he knows the epic rolling off her tongue, and part of him burns that she brought this book, this story, this myth of a man who wandered for twenty years into the quiet and dim intimacy of this room, this time, this grief.

“He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home.”

No god kept him from home. No god could be that cruel. Coralee _was_ , in her loving way. Coralee taught him that love had teeth and edges and no mercy, and for a moment, he is drowning again.

“Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times.”

He has never needed a _goddess_ to tell him anything. He has seen humanity corrupt a narrative too many times to count. He knows that storytelling is the closest thing to apotheosis anyone can hope to achieve.

“Find the beginning.”

“Alex.” He flops backwards on the bed, wholly undignified, and lets his fingers find purchase on the duvet. “Why are you reading this?”

“Because I like this translation,” she says, not looking up from the page.

He glances over at her, at the way soft-edged shadows tug at her cheeks and the corners of her mouth, before staring up at the ceiling like it was a map to a wine-dark sea. “That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s a good translation,” she retorts, an old tinge of defensiveness in her voice. “Translating ‘polytropos’ to ‘complicated’? Brilliant. And it shows us the complexities of Odysseus. He’s not much of a hero sometimes.”

“Alex.”

“I mean, he sacked Troy, and he did so much that wasn’t about being a good Greek, you know? I know that Agamemnon tried to sacrifice his own daughter, and that’s not much better--”

“Alex.” He rolls over onto his side, swinging his legs up onto the mattress and propping his head up on one hand. He waits until she looks at him, her cheeks rosier than dawn. “You picked this story--about a man who was trapped away from his wife and home for twenty years--because it’s a ‘good translation.’”

“Yes,” she says, her voice soft.

He has the sudden urge to reach out, to pluck the book from her hands and bury his head against her. The room is an ocean, he is a raft strung together on Calypso’s shore, and she is an island in the distance and the promise of home. “You’re very obvious.”

“I _was_ already reading it,” she insists. “I thought--”

“Polytropos,” he says, turning the word over in his mouth. “You thought of me.”

A silence, heavier than a headstone. “I did.”

“Is that my Homeric epithet, then?” he asks, a little bitterly. “Richard polytropos. Richard who wandered and was lost.”

“No, probably not,” she says after a long, rich moment of silence and thought. He could have fed on her silence, but he knows her words are more sustaining, and he hates that, and he loves that, and the two ends of the spectrum are so close that the line becomes a circle with him in the center and her there with him. “Not polytropos. Probably glaucopis.”

“Bright eyes,” he murmurs, a little surprised. “An epithet for Athena.”

“Yes.”

“You'd give me the epithet of a goddess?”

She shrugs and picks at the edge of the duvet with studied casualness. “You think you don’t deserve that, either,” she says, and it's not a question.

“I'm already named after a king,” he says stiffly. “Apotheosis seems a bit much to aim for.”

She reaches over and gingerly grasps his hand. Suddenly the swaying of the ocean room quiets to her pulse, his pulse, and their shared breath.

“I'm named for a conqueror,” she says. “There's no shame in wanting to aim higher.”

Her hand is still warm. Slowly, he turns his over until they are palm-to-palm and studies them. She has smaller hands--no shock there--but there is a thin scar in the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger.

“I dropped a glass when I was doing dishes at home,” she tells him, unbidden. “One of the pieces caught me there. It went through. I couldn’t write for a couple of weeks.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he murmurs, running his thumb over the white line.

She shrugs. “It was a few years ago. Now it just hurts sometimes when I stretch it too far.”

He nods, half-listening, half-hypnotized by the sway of his thumb over her skin. The glow of the reading light is faint and golden. Memories seem distant, and she is close, her presence lapping against him like a wave.

He doesn’t know why he moves, just that he does, just that he raises her hand to his mouth to press his lips to the small white line. He hears her breath catch, and he glances at her.

“Richard, what…?”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles into her skin. He _should_ let her hand drop. He _should_ turn away. He _should_ ask her, as brusquely as he can manage, to go home, get some rest in her own bed, in her own space, so that he can create a space that doesn’t have Coralee in it but doesn’t have her in it, either.

He should, so he turns her hand over in his and presses his mouth to the inside of her wrist. He tastes the salt of her skin, and the woman of iron and fire is also the woman made of the sea, and he hears her whisper his name like it is the name of a god.

He can’t say how long they stay like that, his fingers around her hand, his mouth against her pulse. He is certain, in his bones, that he could stay like that until the universe reached its inevitable heat death, and he is just as certain that this reaction is too much, too encompassing, too inappropriate for a man his age, with his scars, with his sensibilities.

He is certain of this until Alex gently takes his chin in her free hand and pulls him up to her, until she brushes a kiss against his forehead, until she puts her lips to his own.

 _Find the beginning_ , the poem begs the muse, and Alex kisses him like it is the spark of their own personal etiological myth, like she can write cosmogonic stories to their heartbeats. In the heady rush of kissing her, he’s certain she can. He sits up properly and slips his arms around her, urging her closer until they are a tangle of limbs and potentially bad decisions. Her mouth moves from his to his cheek, to his jaw, to his throat, and he responds by running his fingers down her spine to the curve of her hips. She huffs a laugh-- _ticklish_ , he realizes, and he tucks that discovery away like a treasure--and nips at his skin.

The blood rushes there, heat rushes to his face, and he swallows a groan that is closer to a whimper than he’d like. She freezes. “Did I hurt you?” she asks. “I don’t--it’s been awhile--I didn’t mean--”

He brushes away her worry with a light nip of his own, and she sighs and melts against him.

He doesn’t dare push this any further than she suggests; he knows, distantly, that he is delicate right now, that this thing between them can be as ephemeral as the dawn, and he knows, far more intimately, that for every time he has wanted to force her away, he has drawn her in closer. He kisses her again, trying to memorize the shape of her mouth on his, the way she tastes under his tongue, the way her warmth seeps into his marrow and makes a home there. Everything in the room is fluid. He has traveled a wine-dark sea to this moment, and it isn’t home, and it is home, and it’s better than home, and he doesn’t know how to parse that.

Alex pulls away first, her breath coming faster as she pushes her hair out of her eyes. “I--” she starts, and then she frowns, biting her lip. He tries not to stare. “I don’t know how to say this,” she says after a long moment stretched taut as piano wire.

“That hasn’t stopped you before,” he points out. His hands come to rest on her thighs, spread out on either side of him, and he _wants_ , and he wants more than just the bare song of sex, and his heart clenches at that.

She gives him a look, and it is so wholly Alex and so wholly usual that he can’t help but laugh.

“Stop that,” she chides him, but she doesn’t move from her position. Her hands come to rest on top of his, squeezing in comfort. “I just--this is…” She trails off and tilts her head, considering. “This is nice,” she assures him. “More than nice. Very, _very_ nice. I’d like to do it again. But--but you’re...there’s a lot. A lot is happening right now, Richard, and I don’t want to be--”

“You’d never be,” he says into the darkness, and its veracity rings like a bell. “I couldn’t--I wouldn’t--”

She bites her lip again, closes her eyes against a thought he can’t hear, and nods. “I know,” she says. “I mean, I think I know. I trust you. And we’re in this together. I just--I don’t think you should have to worry about this--” She gestures to the space between them. “--when we’ve got so much else to do, and--”

“Alex.” He leans up and kisses her again. Just once. Just for a taste. Just for a memory. “I understand.”

“Do you?”

It stings, but it’s not unfounded, he knows. “Odysseus wandered for twenty years,” he reminds her, and she smiles, sunlight-soft. “And Athena still disguised him when he returned to Ithaca. Homecoming is not without its price.”

“Nostalgia,” she murmurs, and he arches an eyebrow at her. “It comes from nostos and algos--homecoming and pain.”

There is not much he can say to that.

Alex smiles again, gentle, with its own brand of pain, and brushes her lips against his forehead. “I should go,” she says, shifting off of him.

Later, he would analyze his motion, assign meaning and excuse because grief is a paralytic and would freeze him in the morning, but now he reaches out and clasps her hand and whispers, “Would you stay?”

She stops, blinks.

“I don’t--” he says, but there are so many things to finish it that he can’t.

\-- _w_ _ant to be alone._

_\--want this to be something else to lose._

_\--want this to be anything_ but _something else to lose._

Everything swirls around him like the sea. She doesn’t respond.

He drops her hand and rolls onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he says. “That’s too much to--”

“Richard.” Alex leans over. He closes his eyes, and she kisses him lightly, once, twice, before brushing her lips against his brow. “I’ll stay.”

He doesn’t open his eyes again, instead burrowing under the duvet with graceless dignity as he tries and fails to ignore her crossing around to the other side of the bed and slipping under the covers. He doesn’t turn to face her. He doesn’t reach out to her, against every protest in his soul.

But when her hand brushes against his, tentative in spite of the intimacy they’ve shared, he twines his fingers with hers, and he covers his eyes with the memory of her kisses like coins, and with the warmth of her skin singing of beginnings to him even over the grief pounding the drums in his heart, he lets the ferryman row him across the shore to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> The translation of The Odyssey that Alex reads is by Emily Wilson, and it is amazing, and I love it.
> 
> The astronomy pun was not, in fact, on purpose, no matter what anyone else says.
> 
> Apparently my thing is overblown classics metaphors instead of addressing one's feelings in a healthy manner--who knew?


End file.
